Byron Ayanoglu

Maria and the Muses Byron Ayanoglu

MARIA and the MUSES This is a story about an elderly Greek widow who has just been arrested. She has had a rocky ride. Born into the Nazi occupation of her Aegean island, Maria grew up during the Greek Civil War and its impoverished aftermath in the fifties. Married off when still a teenager to a rich man many years her senior, she suffers the indignities of an abused wife for five decades as Greece struggles with the political chaos of the sixties, the tyranny of the Junta in the seventies, the fake normalcy of the corrupt eighties and nineties, and the exaggerated promises of the European Union in the new century. Finally free of her husband, who dies in 2004, Maria spends eight peaceful years with her books and her nine friends, each of whom is named for one of the famous Muses, until that fateful morning of her reckoning in 2012, at the nadir of the Greek financial crisis. We go back in time and relate her story to uncover the secrets of her life.